SEO is something really simple and it amuses me that corporates are willing to shell out loads of greens on maintaining their top positions on SERPS. But then, though we all know how to change a bulb, we still pay an electrician to do it. π Speciality is money in itself.
Here are a few excerpts from my mindmap on SEO that I am currently working on.
- Incomplete sites, 404 links andΒ pages with little to no content will give you the boot on search engines.
- When your site is ready, make sure to ping the Google, Yahoo! and Live engines with a sitemap so that they can index you. I have had Google index me for a site within 12 hours of creating it with WordPress. All I did was create a post which used the default ping feature of WordPress and use the sitemap plugin for create a sitemap page.
- Sitemaps need to be of two kinds, one for the visitor in HTML and the other in XML for the lovely search bots.
- Reputable Directories and Social Networks like Del.icio.us and furl will give your site good brownie points.
- I am sure you know this SEO tip: NO Duplicate Content! But did you know that using multiple mirror sites with the same content is also a NO NO ?!?
- Keyword Density is important, but how much stuffing is called SPAM?!? SEO gurus usually aim for a 20% for a high competitive phrase, but usually 8-10% is good enough.
- Make sure your titles are readable, yet keyword rich. Consider the title of this post. “32 SEO Tips You Never Knew!” has the keyword “SEO tips” but the rest was inspired from copyblogger tips on writing interesting titles. π
- ALT tags on images are very important too. They apart from making you rank on image search, will also help those with disabilities to know what type of images are being shown on the page.
- Title Tags are usually meant to be about 50-80 charecters.
- Meta Tags can have about 30-40 words. But this is not very important in today’s SEO as most of the engines do not give importance to meta description or meta keywords. But it does not hurt to have ’em!
- Always have a H1 to depict the most important title, and a H2/H3 to show the sub-title key phrase. Helps the readers scanning the page as well as our lovely friendly search engine bots!
- Have valid coded pages and fix any display errors.
- SEO friendly urls. This is a nobrainer π .com/index.php?word=seo?area=IN?tips=32 or .com/32-seo-tips/ ?
- Take care about how you link to other sites. And be sure to have less than 100 links pointing outside your site. Prevents flagging of your site as spam!
I will be publishing the rest of the SEO tips this week, so stay tuned!
Update: Part 2 of the Free SEO Tips is here.
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